More products designed around actigraphy keep surfacing. aXbo is a ‘Sleep Phase Alarm Clock’ by an Austrian company. The basic idea is to differentiate sleep phases (light, deep, REM) using body movements that are detected via a motion-sensor worn on the wrist. The bedside clock unit has other features like power naps, auto sleep melody fade, use for two people, smart alarm etc. A desktop ‘research’ application downloads the data and helps analyze it. So the overall service is similar to Zeo or Fitbit, except it looks like aXbo was perhaps first-to-market (2006 press release discusses launch).
Remote motion-sensor based alarm clocks are probably a nerdy gizmo for now. But it does provide a good use case of how everyday appliances are getting smarter and generating volumes of data. It’ll be very interesting to see how such data can be leveraged to further sleep disorder research- as I wrote in my Zeo post.
Note that there are other products out there that offer the same functionality: FitBit, WakeMate, SleepTracker, and the somewhat unique Zeo.